Stream ‘Dark Signal’ on Netflix and Fear Your Radio (Wait, Who Has a Radio?)

The only thing that isn’t scary about Dark Signal, the 2016 Welsh horror movie that’s currently streaming on Netflix, is that nobody listens to the radio anymore, so the idea of a murder (or series of murders) playing out over the airwaves is less blood-curdling than the idea of, say, a murder playing out over the course of a podcast episode. And honestly, don’t we already have podcasts that do essentially that?

Of course, horror movies that try to incorporate cutting-edge technology are incredibly hit-and-miss. The currently-in-theaters horror flick Friend Request tries to use social media to goose its slasher concept. Its premise seems awfully close to Unfriended, a horror movie that essentially played out entirely in Face Time. One Missed Call already seems incredibly dated as a horror movie that relies on cell phones that you use AS PHONES, and that movie was only from 2008. Technology moves too fast for movies that ride the cutting edge to avoid seemingly instantly dated. Which is why a horror movie centered at a radio station holds so much more appeal.

Much like abandoned Victorian mansions and dark library corridors, radio stations are all the more conducive to horror movies because they’re essentially ghosts themselves. That, plus the fact that the yawning chasm of radio signals — white noise, stray frequencies — offers another great staple of ghost stories and horror: the door that anything could be lurking behind. Dark Signal isn’t quite as great an entry into the radio-station-horror canon as, say, Pontypool — the 2008 Canadian horror movie that imagines a viral outbreak that’s carried over radio waves — but it’s still more than solidly scary.

Dark Signal takes place on the last day of business for a local radio station before they get bought out by a national network. The foul-mouthed and ornery DJ, Laurie (Siwan Morris of the first season of Skins), bristles when her producer suggests having a psychic on for their last show. The psychic ends up picking up a stray vocal from a woman seemingly being stalked. The psychic and Laurie’s producer think it’s Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP). At the same time,a young mother (Joanna Ignaczewska) gets caught up in her boyfriend’s burglary plans. Oh, and there’s also a serial killer lurking about. The supernatural and the slasher combine for a truly unsettling time.

It’s no surprise that Dark Signal is such effective horror, considering it comes from producer Neil Marshall, the man responsible for the modern horror classic The Descent, another movie that turns the forgotten caverns of our world into the setting for modern horror.